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Automatic Skip Driver, or ASD.EXE, is a Windows 98/ME utility that identifies devices that are causing a computer to stop responding during startup. When a hardware device or its driver is defective, the device driver may fail to load and cause Windows to hang. After identifying the problem device, ASD bypasses that device by disabling it the next time you restart the computer.
Automatic Skip Driver Agent lists all devices or operations that have failed to start. This agent keeps a record of all the devices it disables in a file called Asd.log.
ASD is used in Windows 98 and Windows ME to try and correct system crashes or hangs that occur during boot by disabling problem devices but this may disable the loading of drivers for some of the hardware, which could cause further problems. Hence there is an option to instruct the Automatic Skip Driver Agent to enable the device it has previously disabled.
Devices disabled by ASD are listed on the Device Manager with a yellow exclamation mark (!). Code 11 is the Device Manager Hardware error code associated with ASD.
